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Feb 9, 2011

rePly Chair Project

Dawn breaks and it's time to face a new day.

You leave the house in the early hours and then you crawl inch by mind numbingly boring inch slowly through the never-ending snake of monotonous morning traffic. In fact, one morning I moved so slowly I may have actually seen one of my nails grow.

There is one benefit to moving slower than the aging process. You get the opportunity to peruse the lines and lines of skips that have taken up residence outside the over priced "boom years properties", which have now been forced into becoming simple old family homes - mortgaged up to the rafters (and you're lucky if you have any rafters!)

In what feels like a weird, over-sized, middle class Bric'a'Brac Sale you have skips that are filled with genuine rubbish. Bad floorboards, Rusted Pipes and Broken Windows. Others are filled with genuine treasure. Ornate Doors, Unfashionable Furniture and anything else found in the house that can and will be replaced with an IKEA counterpart - a somewhat "Furniture Version" of The Stepford Wives if you like.

As The Guardian article comments "skip-hunting, which involves lurking outside houses undergoing refurbishment in search of discarded household items, is apparently enjoying a fresh revival as a result of the recession."

But there's another class of skip.

The "We're building an extension" skip. This is the one that I'd like to discuss here.

It's when I see these skips, overflowing with large sheets of wood and building materials that I hear the inner voice crying out in me... "WHY DON'T I OWN A VAN?????" How the hell am I going to fit 5 x 12ft Sheets of Wood into the back of my Volkswagen Polo?

It pains me to see this kind of waste. There is so much that can be made and built from the wasted material I see crammed into these over flowing skips.

Sometimes all you need is a few pieces of simple Plywood.

The rePly chair project was launched on May 4 2006. The project provides free downloadable plans to make your own recycled plywood lounge chair. How cool is that?
All the parts of the chair can be made from small pieces of scrap plywood that you can collect from anywhere.

If you Click on this Link it will bring you to a downloadable pdf that shows you how to do everything. It's as simple as that.

Here's a few examples of chairs made by people who did just that.

Perfect for the Back Garden when we have that once yearly BBQ (standing under umbrellas of course because who can organise a BBQ in advance and hope to have sunshine on the day?)

Or how about for relaxing in? Sitting and sipping some wine on your over priced balcony late into the evening, dreaming of the treasures still to find amongst the rows and rows of skips.